Susi Vine has followed a winding path to get to where she is today, a Stress Transformation Coach, podcast host and speaker.  She weaves together her experience crafting stages and optimizing homes with a passion for “connecting the dots”, drawing on information from practicing experts and current research to synthesize and distill information into user-friendly resources and programs that help people feel empowered to write their own story.

In this episode she covers:

• Getting caught in the ‘adrenaline rush’ of reactive work in high stress environments
• Making change when change is tough
• Why landing at the bottom of your list is holding you back from success
• How little fixes add up to big results
• The power of perspective, and seeking solutions instead of ‘powering through’
• Avoiding overwhelm by changing your approach to stress

Want to talk about how to create change without overwhelm, and feel more empowered in your health + happiness?  Book time on Susi’s calendar at https://3xlessstress.com/strategy

If you’re not already part of the online community, join the Live with Less Stress facebook group at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/livewlessstress

Susi Vine: Welcome back. I am so happy to have you with me this week for a unique little episode of Happified today. Yes. Me, I am holding onto the mic. I am not inviting a guest to join me. I wanted to connect with you, my listeners, my audience, and share a little bit about my story and this mission that I am on. The reason that I am creating these tools that you can use to create your.

Thriving life first. I want to thank you for being a listener. Thank you for joining me here, whether you catch the episodes every week as they come out or whether this is the first time you’re tuning in, I’m grateful for you. And I hope you find ideas that you can put to work in your own life.

Inspiration. You can carry with you and maybe worth sharing with friends who need a little pick me up and a little boost in a world that can otherwise feel pretty overwhelmed. So I’d like to ask you a couple of questions to get started and forgive me for having a couple of notes, but I don’t want to go too wildly off track.

So I want to stay on course in, make this as digestible as I can. I’ll save those long-winded rants and soapbox additions for another day. Let me ask you, or let me know if you can relate. Do you feel like that hamster on the. Or do you notice that you wake up on Monday? Wishing it was Friday again already.

Do you wish you had more energy to make the most of your weekends and then fill them up with adventure and play time with friends? Do you constantly find your exercise, your healthy eating and self-care time being gobbled up by demands from work or from those rare these days? Opportunities for social engagement.

Do you wish it was easier to achieve what you’re working so hard to reach and know that you’re on the best path to get there. Imagine my friends imagine not waking up on Monday and wishing the week away. Imagine having the clarity and the focus to stick with your priorities and be effective and efficient in that.

Imagine, having more space in your day to do what you know is important and to take better care of your body. Imagine having more

imagine finding the key to happiness that doesn’t depend on the things you’re chasing like that promote. The vacation that keeps getting postponed or the soulmate who hasn’t dropped into your life yet. Imagine feeling like you’re the one in control of your life, steering the ship. Instead of being thrown around by the prevailing winds, maybe you were taught that being happy is waiting for you at the finish line.

I’m here to say that may be the reason you’re not getting any closer is because what they told you is all. My name is Susie. As you know, thank you for joining me on this episode of hap fide. I love helping people who want more out of life, get success and happiness without burning themselves out by reconnecting with what lights them up.

I believe that it’s not your fault. If you’re struggling to get all that you’re chasing and your. Feeling you’re not getting any closer. I believe that you’re doing exactly what you were taught by our parents, our teachers, the society that has a broken system of success telling us that working harder is the secret.

While we’re waking up exhausted, miserable, discouraged, and overwhelmed at doing it all over again, grinding it. I believe it’s time to stop sacrificing our health, our relationships, and our happiness in the pursuit of our goals and success. It’s getting harder and harder to get ahead and stay ahead. And over the last few years, we’ve all had a chance to re-examine what really matters to us.

Maybe one or two of those values comes up for you right now. If you take just a minute to think.

I want to thank you again for spending your time here with me listening to the podcast, I’m on a mission to share information that isn’t easily found that sparks ideas and gives you a brighter picture of what is possible. I might be out to launch a revolution of people who are sick and tired of feeling sick and tired, and who rediscovered, just how powerful, how.

And how inherently joyful they can be. So maybe you’re a longtime listener. Maybe you’re new to the show. I feel like it’s been a bit since I’ve held onto the mic and I don’t always make it clear what I’m up to here and where am I mission comes from. So as I do share frequently on the show, I have followed a winding path.

And because change was one thing I wasn’t afraid of. I’ve done a lot of different work for a lot of different people. I’ve helped to create art that has been on stages across the country. I could probably say around the world, and I’ve sat with senior clients as they examine every piece of the life they’ve lived as they make one of the most difficult moves that they will ever face.

Maybe you’ve never thought that. But ever since you left your parents’ home, maybe starting with a dorm room and then moving on through life. Almost always, we move into a larger space. We gain a partner or a spouse, maybe making room for children, always adding more. Until way down the line. One day it’s time to move into something smaller rather than larger.

And my clients in that business that I worked in were in their eighties and nineties. And so it was typically a health issue that meant it was time to move. They had lost their independence and they felt horrible. Their kids or their doctor was telling them they couldn’t stay in the home that they loved.

And they felt forced into a situation that they dreaded. What I came to see was that as much as I could help them make this transition as easy as possible, we would all be there someday. But I believe we don’t have. We have a lot more power in writing our own story than we might recognize. And certainly then many of us are putting into practice when we end up at the end of our lives.

That is the sum of our choices. Unfortunately, while we’re busy living our lives, we tend to let so many opportunities to make our own choices. Pass us by. We eat what is convenient, we’re overbooked. And we forget to schedule time to do what’s best for ourselves. We’re stressed out and too overwhelmed to get perspective on the source or the solution we give all of our time away so that we’re left with the crumbs.

And we forget how to find joy in the little thing. We’re running on caffeine and simple carbs, or we’re turning to therapeutic diets that have our bodies running in the red zone to counter the effects of stress on our weight and our energy. I know from my own experience that spending years working towards other people’s visions of success can be rewarding if you’re lucky enough to work for good people, but it’s easy to lose track of what is important.

And as the days roll by in the wind two weeks and the months spin in two years, it’s easy to feel like bill Murray in Groundhog’s day. Like you’re living on repeat without making any real progress. What I recognized and couldn’t unsee was that the quality of our lives is the sum of our. And we really can’t make up for years of making bad choices.

When we get to the end, when we reached the goals that we striving for, or when we finally make it to a vacation or retirement, or we get so fed up with living the way life is that we tell someone to take this job and shove it. If we start ups, If we recognize the power that we have to make changes. Now we can make changes that are smaller, that are easier to integrate.

That will have a huge impact on the results we find down the line, instead of waiting until it’s really broken, we need to start looking for the little fixes to keep ourselves running at optimum. And then when we do, we don’t need. To lose our independence. We don’t need to let chronic disease take root from stress, from depression and anxiety from feeling like we have no control over our lives.

If we stop giving away our power, we begin to write our own story. So that’s a lot, maybe more than you thought you were getting yourself into in this episode. So let’s back up a bit instead of writing the end game, let’s look at what’s going on right now. The not totally broken. So why do I need to fix it situation?

Let’s start with what you might be noticing. Here’s where I found myself. In that job where I was taking care of those senior clients, I was helping them and their families during a very emotional time. We would often get last minute requests for help when they recognize what they were really up against.

If their house had sold and they’re moving date was closing in and they still had closets and cabinets full of stuff. And you can’t underestimate just how full closets can become over 40 years. We would get rushed jobs and I would get late night calls from my clients with questions, concerns that I just remember the storage space above the garage, and the movers are coming tomorrow at 8:00 AM crisis.

So in that work, when I was running those jobs, I was always in reaction mode, answer the call or don’t answer the call, let it go to voicemail, agonize over whether or not to return the call. Finally do, and then get caught up in a 45 minute conversation off the. Arrived before the movers and work at top speed, wrapping up the last minute items.

So it all could get on the truck, but by the time they closed the door. And so we can ideally get to the destination, unpack and arrange everything in their new home by the end of the day, because that was the promise that we made as service providers to take the stress out of their move, which meant we put the stress on ourselves.

Yeah, that can be completely unlike any day you have ever had to live and your work experience. Thank goodness. Right. But I’ll bet you can relate to the adrenaline rush to being in response mode, whatever that is, that drops in on your regularly scheduled Workday, the reports that they suddenly want early, the extra meeting that just showed up on your schedule, the team member that isn’t pulling their weight.

So suddenly more has landed on your. And you power through because you don’t have a choice it’s got to get done and no one else is there to save the day, time to roll up your sleeves and dive in the clock spins by at least this part of your day can go quickly. No wonder most heart attacks occur on Mondays a whole week of working in reaction mode and putting out fires.

Just thinking about it is enough to stress me back out. But how do we break that cycle? How do we stop the crazy train? One way to start taking back control is just that taking a look at where there is still within your control, the change. There’s a lot out there that we can’t resolve, and it’s easy to get lost in that when we shift the focus to what we can change, we finally have a chance to see opportunities instead of roadblocks.

Ultimately, we can start seeing solutions. So what can you control your focus? Maybe not your time yet, but you can control how many things you’re trying to do at the same time. We’ve been trained that every notification, whether it’s email, text, phone calls, everything demands an immediate reply. But let me ask you.

If you don’t get an answer to an email within an hour or two, do you think you’re never going to hear, not likely text messages depending on the person and the relationship. Maybe you do expect that immediate response, but maybe by making some explanations at first that you will be able to send a full response.

Soon you’re focused on something right now, as you start to read. Define and establish boundaries. You might be surprised to discover that you don’t need to check your email every 20 minutes, the two or three blocks of time in the morning and in the afternoon, or even less is sufficient. And that you can actually make some progress on the work at hand, rather than losing so much time in changing your focus and always picking up where you just left off Bernay brown shares in her work that she has discovered that resents.

Is a form of envy. We tend to be envious of people who do have boundaries, who don’t get roped into extra work. It’s something to notice when you resent someone or some thing, is it because there’s a boundary of your own? That’s been crossed when we remember that we have the right to establish boundaries and then.

We start to break the chaos cycle and begin to take control of our time, energy and emotions. So I might not get this story exactly right. But you might have heard the story of a young ax man in the great north. And he showed up to work young, but determined to prove that he had. What was needed for the job.

And he went to work and he powered through working at maximum speed and he came back well over quota. No problem. All right, you’ve got the job. Come on back. We’ll see you tomorrow. And the next day he shows up just a strong looking, just as hard. He’s not as much over quota right around the limit, but he’s got good work.

And they say, great, we’ll see you come on back tomorrow. And the next day he comes back working just as hard, even harder, starting to sweat because he recognizes he’s not keeping the pace that he did before and he doesn’t want to let them down. And finally, at the end of the day, he comes in, his numbers are, are off even lower than the day before.

And the lead says, all right, we’ll have you back. But let me ask you a question. When’s the last time you sharpened your. So maybe that story isn’t new to you, but it’s something that we tend to forget that with a little time upfront, a little preparation, a little clarity, moving forward, we can work with more efficiency and focus and productivity.

Sometimes it seems counterintuitive to take that time for ourselves, but the results prove that it’s our best way. So when we get caught up in the fray, when we work at top speed and we try to hit that maximum productivity mark, but we haven’t been able to restore ourselves. We haven’t gotten centered and clear on the priority and the best path forward, the most productive thing, most effective way we can be working at this point in time.

Then we end up working with a lot more energy, a lot less results than we just. And we get overwhelmed and we get frustrated on hard on ourselves. So that’s one area again, in which it pays to have that understanding to remember that working harder, rarely leads us to the best results and we can step back and get perspective.

We can build actually practices that serve us. It’s actually easier to get what we want with less. But first it takes breaking that cycle, stepping aside and getting perspective on what’s actually bringing us results and the best way forward.

So the third part that I wanted to share, as I’m sharing just a couple of these highlights for you to take and sit with today, and we can come back and explore these more deeply in the future. Is that overwhelm that so many of us are facing. Here in the Southern California area. Again, I haven’t heard definitive results, but in a poll of people in the workforce, self reported burnout was at about 60% fairly recently within the last few months, which has risen dramatically over the last two years, which was already at a high point before we fell into this pandemic situation.

And workplace burnout is exactly that it is burnout that arises from stress in the workplace, but our tolerance, our capacity and resilience can be eaten up in other aspects of life so that we’re less able to handle and resolve that stress that shows up at work at any rate, the level of burnout and the cost to employers.

While that shouldn’t be the primary focus. Is bringing a lot more attention to the causes, the ways that we can prevent it and the ways that we can move forward. But here’s what I notice about that situation of overwhelm overwhelm compounds with stress we’re already stressed. So we don’t have that capacity.

To meet the additional stress that shows up in our lives. That’s why one of the things that I love to do is help people recognize those three aspects of stress. The sneaky stressors that can add up on the emotional, the physical and the environmental levels. When we clear some of those off of our plate, we have that capacity back, but change is another stressor.

And we’ve been through a lot of change lately, a lot of uncertainty, and we’ve been waiting for things to go back to normal and that. An unknown factor. So when you compound stress with change, it’s easy to fall into overwhelm. And that is the point at which it’s hard to make any great choices. As I already said, right?

We’re living our lives based on convenience and without enough resources for self care, for knowing how to take the best care of ourselves to go around. So when we address. That stress. And when we take a look at how we’re showing up to it, whether we feel threatened and overwhelmed, or if we find opportunities to feel empowered, to rise to the situation, those micro changes that we can start to make have much greater result.

When we take control of the situation when we are being. Present and choosing our response rather than simply reacting to the situations as they come up. We have so much more authority in where we are heading. We can actually start moving towards what we want with less effort and the pieces start to fall into place rather than thinking.

We will finally be happy when we reach that destination, that ultimate goal, that picture of success. We start to recognize. That finding opportunities to be healthy, be well, and be happy that state of being pays off in spades because it’s actually easier and faster to see the results that we’re looking for.

So I just want to reiterate or remind or sum up to say the change is possible and it doesn’t require more of your energy in it. Putting yourself first and making tiny changes, leads to big results. First in the stress that you’re experiencing, then in your happiness, ultimately in living the kind of life that you love, waking up to every.

So if this is something that you want to dive more deeply into, this is the kind of work that I love to do. I love to unwind this with my coaching clients. And so when you visit dot com, where you can find all of my episodes, if you have any catching up to do, you can also at the top of the screen, in the menu, choose books.

And you can get on my calendar for 30 minutes, completely free. And we can take a look at what are the things that are adding up on your plate. Where are the points at which you feel overwhelmed? What are the things that really matter to you? How can we get clarity on your picture of success that isn’t influenced by society or expectations of other people and what are some power.

Micro changes that you can start to put into place to lead you into the future that you’re going to love waking up to. So I invite you to take advantage of that opportunity. Visit Happify live.com at the top of the page and the menu. You’ll find the button to book call. I would love to connect with you.

I’d love to hear what you find that serves you in the program. I would love to hear what you feel is frustrating or overwhelming, or could be holding you back. And I would love. To explore opportunity and solutions and see if I can support you in rewriting this story. Thanks for joining me. Thank you always for being a listener and take good care of yourself.

And I will see you back here super soon.